The emergence of resistance to antibacterial agents is a growing problem for human and animal health, and new drugs to treat infections are urgently needed. Particularly desirable are drugs that can treat infections caused by microorganisms that display resistance to currently used antibiotics. Efforts to overcome the growing problem of resistance have included modification of known antibiotics, classical screening of new compound libraries and natural product libraries, and genomic efforts to identify novel targets to which no cross resistance with existing antibiotics would be anticipated. Even with this significant antibiotic discovery effort, only a few agents that represent new chemical classes of antibiotic agents have been approved by regulatory agencies in recent years. In addition, few antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that have developed resistance to currently used antibiotics are in clinical development. Furthermore, a number of potent antibiotic agents have been found to be too toxic for clinical use or to have significant side effects that limit their therapeutic utility.
There is clearly a need in the art both for new agents to combat microbial infection and for new approaches to antibiotic drug discovery.